Thoughts on taxonomy occassion by an article in the NYT

HUMMINGBIRDS from

Kunstformen der Natur

by Ernst Haeckel

Carol Yoon has an article in the New York Times today discussing taxonomy. She makes a number of important points:

• Descriptive science is important, and without taxonomy there would be very little good biological science.
• The field of systematic biology has fallen into doldrums, with many of the practioners reaching an advanced age, collections being closed or even abandoned, and enthusiasm going elsewhere.
• I would add that, as Ed Wilson has pointed out, we have not identified and classified huge numbers of species, and it is far too early to abandon systematice biology.
• Once any cultivated person in our dominant culture was an amateur taxonomist, and even today many tribal peoples have extensive knowledge of plants and animals of their environment,
• Yet today few of our urban folk has much information about or interest in the plants and animals in the world, many of which of course surround us even in our urban or suburban environment.
• I would add that information on taxonomy is very available if one seeks it out and attends to it.

I was especially interested in her account that we seem to have a center of the brain that is critical to our ability to classify plants and animals, and when that center has been damaged life becomes very difficult indeed. She goes on to note that the classifications produced by different cultures share important fundamental characteristics -- we all recognize plants from animals, birds from fish and land animals, and generally group mammals together, we differentiate bushes from trees. So perhaps we have evolved some hard wiring as a species for imposing order on the tree of life.

I was impressed by her comment that we tend to use two words names to identify an object generically and then specifically. While the words are different from language to language, and indeed the classification may differ somewhat from culture to culture, the two word practice seems very broadly accepted.

All of this goes to the point that we think with our brains, and the brain structure and organization imposes structure on our thoughts which is hard to break, and indeed should be broken only with care lest we lose something important.

Incidentally, not only is taxonomy the basis of science, it is the basis of most of good analysis and decision making!